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Monday Musing: What is digital excellence?

On 31 October I (the BPA’s Information Manager) attended and presented at the MemberWise Digital Excellence conference.

This event brought together over 400 delegates from associations, across the UK. It focused on how the digital drive is impacting and changing the membership sector in ways we never thought possible.

To give you an idea of the scale of the growth of digital information by the time you finish reading this blog over 860,000,000 emails, 2,357,000 tweets and 21,000,000 google searches will have taken place across the globe[1].

Data is the keystone of our organisations, with the General Data Protection Act (GDPR) coming in soon this is only set to grow.

Two of the sessions I attended focused on the hot topic of GDPR, the first gave a legal perspective with the key message of reassurance:

The gold standard for the Data Protection Act (DPA) becomes the baseline for GDPR.

If your organisation has existing processes in place for the DPA then meeting the requirements for the GDPR is very simple. We should look at GDPR as a positive force for change and a golden opportunity to review our existing processes and improve them.

The second session was from the perspective of a marketing manager who spoke about sharing information. Under GDPR both the organisation gathering personal information and any third parties they share information with are responsible for using and storing data correctly.

Don’t forgot to check how you are sharing your data, it may be secure in your systems but if you are transferring it, is this undertaken securely?

The example given was the transfer of data for a marketing campaign. With a staff member away the organisation was rushed to send information to a third party for them to deliver the campaign, the data was incorrectly extracted from the source database resulting in unnecessary personal information being sent to the marketing company.

The reasons and recipients may well be different for your organisation but the process of extracting and transferring data applies to us all and this will not stop being important with the arrival of GDPR in May.

Be clear on your data transfer policy. Who can extract data and what data can be sent?

A further take away from the day was the Data Protection Network. A dedicated resource in the field of Data Protection and Privacy. They have lots of information for commercial and not for profit organisations around GDPR, including a GDPR Data Retention quick guide and a guide to conducting a legitimate interest assessment (helping you assess whether or not you can rely on legitimate interests as a lawful basis for processing data under GDPR).

Don’t forget that the BPA is here to help you with GDPR too, look out for our upcoming GDPR Preparation Events in the New Year. Please email membership@britishparking.co.ukto register your interest and highlight any area of GDPR you wish us to focus on and provide you with more information on.

Take advantage of your membership benefits too, if you have any questions about GDPR you can receive up to 30 minutes free legal advice from our dedicated GDPRLine, part of the BPA Lawline service. Phone 0345 241 3024 or e-mail bpa@jmw.co.uk